Big corps and how difficult they make it to help their customers

[superboyac]

So I'm at work, and we have one of those very expensive Cisco/Tandberg video conferencing systems.  I have some configuration questions, so I went on the website to find a number to call.  Nothing.  Not a single fucking number anywhere to be found.  You think that's just an innocent oversight?  Think again.
So they have contact form, where you have to fill out all your personal information just to have the privilege of making contact with the honorable Cisco employees.  So I fill it out and get all sorts of big red errors....the country wasn't filled out, excuse me!  Then I fixed everything and it said I didn't have the State filled out.  I looked, and there's no box for State!!  I'm telling you, these companies are doing all they can to take as much as they can without doing ANY work.  Customer service?  Gone as soon as you buy something.  This is wrong, guys.  This is just making everyone feel shitty.  It's no way to do business.

And these are all the people that are making the world feel guilty about the copyright stuff and all these other privacy/content issues currently being battled out.  That's always their MO: make people feel guilty, wield some authoritative power, manipulate all the information available until it becomes impossible to find the truth, steal as much money as possible while providing as little service as possible.  And the whole time, they are making YOU feel guilty, and they are acting like they are the ones fighting the good fight of justice, freedom, liberty, and moral goodness.

And these assholes won't even let you call them after you've given them thousands of dollars for a fucking camera.

[cranioscopical]

Ok — but how do you really feel about them? 

[superboyac]

Ok — but how do you really feel about them? 

-cranioscopical (February 21, 2012, 02:30 PM)

I've become very sensitive to it.  I just started a side business a couple of years ago, and we go out of our way to make sure the customers are happy.  We answer calls immediately, we're polite and helpful, we answer questions within hours.  And it's a TON of work to do that, but I don't see any alternative.  When these guys do this, AND they have the money to do it better, and instead they do even less...that really just gets me riled up.  How can a big company not have a phone number? 

This is their business philosophy:

[wraith808]

Actually, they do.  It's just not something that they have on their site.  I know this from experience.  You probably need to find the person that closed the contract- their access to support is based on your contract.

[superboyac]

Actually, they do.  It's just not something that they have on their site.  I know this from experience.  You probably need to find the person that closed the contract- their access to support is based on your contract.

-wraith808 (February 21, 2012, 03:17 PM)

I understand that.  It's just a shitty way to do it.  My point is this: if you actually CARE about customer support, you make it as easy as possible.  They know for a fact that if they make it a little harder to find a number or email, most people will just give up trying to contact them.  And this means there is less work for them for customer support.  No small business would EVER get away with that.  If you're a small business and you don't bend over backwards for your customer these days, you will fail immediately.

So while you're statement is technically true, you sort of missed the point of the whole thing.  (I don't mean that personally, I love your posts!).  My intent here was to deliberately move away from the neutral point of view (which I normally tend to take, you know, try to give others the benefit of the doubt).  But this is far too common a practice with the big companies for me to be neutral about it.  They are monopolizing EVERY SINGLE advantage out there in the market, and leaving the little guys to fight to the death for the scraps.  it's not neutral, I'm angry.  And glad to be.

You can see another example of me getting angry here from a couple of years ago:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=23858.0

[Innuendo]

This is Cisco we're talking about here. They don't have a general "call us if you have any problems" tech support line. If your equipment has a valid support contract then you have the methods made available to you as to how to obtain support.

If you don't have a support contract you're SOL.

[Shades]

Bean-counters rule the world nowadays. And those people think that (on-line) customer support is an expenditure without (directly) identifying returns and the more support you give the more it costs.